As part of Microsoft's Visual Studio 2012 launch activities this week, one of the company's highest ranking executives, S. Somasegar, participated on Friday in an AMA session on Reddit. Somasegar (also known as Soma) is the Corporate Vice President of Microsoft's Developer Division.

The AMA session touched on quite a number of different topics, including the making Windows 8 "Metro" apps. Somasegar stated that the company worked hard to make their Visual Studio 2012 tools easy to work with for the creation of Windows 8 apps. He stated:

We designed the platform and the tools with a view to enable developers to be able to easily build great Windows store app using their existing skillset and knowledge and that's why we enable you to build apps using either HTML5/JavaScript or XAML with VB or C# or C++.

Somasegar also said that in the past few years he has noticed that software developers are no longer trying to concentrate their efforts on one platform or programming language. He stated:

Most developers that I talk to nowadays tell me that they are targeting at least 3 different platforms with their app (a couple of front-end device platforms), a back-end platform, etc. Developers are more looking at what they need to do, what they want to do and are open to picking and choosing languages and technologies and platforms that help them do that in the easiest, fastest, best way.

Other topics discussed in the Reddit AMA session included the future of Microsoft's .NET platform, how open source software helps to direct Microsoft's development projects and more.